Over the past century, we have witnessed many natural disasters and the destruction they have wrought around the world and in the US. Hurricanes Katrina, Gilbert and the Northridge, California earthquake are representative examples. These and other events have cost untold billions of dollars in damage to buildings from wind, earthquakes, flooding, poor indoor air quality and lesser recognized impacts from poor building construction and lost energy efficiency. A central underlying factor in this damage is the lack of a credible and systematic building code enforcement system that can be employed in the field by jurisdiction and special building inspectors. This has been exacerbated by the lack of a system that engages and makes accountable other stakeholders such as builders, designers, and jurisdiction support personnel.
An additional problem is the lack of a technological means to streamline ancillary tasks performed by inspectors, jurisdiction support personnel, designers and contractors that consume time that could otherwise be dedicated to inspection functions. Stakeholders have never had an efficient way of completing building code compliance activities in a systematic, consistent manner with a clearly defined set of expectations and a system that eliminates confusion and targets the specific requirements for each unique building design.
Poor energy code compliance is a widely recognized and unsolved problem in the U.S. quest for reducing dependence on foreign petroleum supplies. All U.S. States currently have a legislative mandate to achieve 90% energy code compliance levels in the near term and no means to achieve that level of compliance without an efficient technology system.
Past solutions are marginal but represented as follows:                Plans and specifications that are approved by the local governmental jurisdictions and required to be on-site at the time of inspections.        Paper compliance forms that consist of code compliance checklist items for each building.        Compliance placards that signify compliance with some aspects of inspection approval.        
None of these solutions comprehensively addresses the problem of code enforcement and this has been documented by numerous forensics reports describing the lack of actual building code compliance in buildings using the aforementioned solutions.
In the past and to this day, inspectors routinely travel to the job site with a permit and set of plans, which are then used to haphazardly check building details during a very limited inspection time window. The result was and is a cursory check that is often based more on the inspector's general code knowledge and less on important detailed requirements that are critically important to integrity of building code compliance associated with and in the specific building design.
It is wrongly assumed that many of the engineering details are reasonably left to the engineer and the contractor to verify. Very seldom does this get accomplished because the engineer is not compensated for this service by the owner and the contractor is not interested because he/she is not held accountable by the over-worked inspector for incorporating these details. Contractors often have a disincentive to include these overlooked details because of added savings, which can enhance project profits. In addition, many residential and small commercial projects do not have engineers and the associated oversight they might bring to these projects.
No existing system provides a rapid, customized check-off protocol for ensuring that all of these essential code details are incorporated and verified as compliant in new buildings. Credible levels of inspection scrutiny are not enforced by any existing system nor does any system economize time spent for logistical tasks of the inspection such that he/she can dedicate more time to actual inspections.
Some of the tasks associated with building inspections include repetitive note taking, trying to communicate with contractors and homeowners, driving to and from inspections, organizing technical inspection details, looking up code requirements, and other duties that are not effectively automated.
Other solutions are inconsistent in all areas of concern because the inspection and compliance processes are very loosely defined because of an absence of automation in detailed tasks of inspection, plan review, staff, and other stakeholder duties. Due to the lack of a comprehensive system that directly addresses code enforcement by field inspectors, building department jurisdictions are simply less effective in serving the public.
Field enforcement is consistently inconsistent in jurisdictions of all sizes because audit mechanisms to check inspector, contractor, and designer performance are non-existent, with an inherent lack of specific scripts for performing the duties of code enforcement at a technically adequate level.
Contractors and subcontractors currently have no credible tools for being held consistently accountable for detailed compliance verification with building codes and ordinances and clearly do not have a means for knowing what to do and efficiently participate in the code compliance process.
Currently, hand-held computing device systems are underutilized as a tool that can allow field inspectors and contractors to check off items from an electronic code compliance checklist that pertain to particular jobs and inspection locations within buildings.
No efficient system exists for communicating between the project design professional, contractor, and jurisdiction in a real-time, efficient manner at the point of inspection in terms of approvals or disapprovals.
In the past and present, inspections have been scripted by individual codes and specific topic areas within those codes, and were not efficiently grouped to include all requirements by inspection location as well as responsibility of the inspector.
No system allows the inspector to move efficiently through a building based on inspecting only those required provisions that are relevant to a specific area.
No system reorganizes what may have seemed like disorganized but relevant inspection checklist items for a specific area, into an inspection report that is cohesively organized by specific codes and requirements within those codes, and then have the results filed and delivered to contractor in hard copy form and/or e-mail using the wireless/Wi-Fi communications capacity of handheld computing systems.
No system has comprehensively organized overall inspection, contractor, designer, and jurisdiction staff functions with the objective to minimize time spent on logistics and maximize time for field inspection.
No system allows the audit of detailed inspection and compliance records by inspection requirement detail, making contractors, designers, and inspection personnel accountable, via audits, for their actions or lack thereof.
No systems have incorporated technology such as dictation, photos, voice files, and pre-defined, context-sensitive inspection report text, code requirement hyperlink indexing, real-time communications with stakeholders, and electronic filing of inspection results.
No system incorporates technology that locates each inspection and its requirements by manageable, step-by-step, hyperlinked locations, where each of the location hyperlinks combine to represent the overall building plan schematics.
No system has required the active participation and accountably of the contractor and sub-contractors with a system requiring their participation and detailed verification of code compliance.
No system generates checklists that direct non-English-speaking subcontracting personnel to follow job-specific codes and specifications.
No existing system educates users in very specific, context-driven technical content that relates to each building code requirement or detail project specification.